The Latest from SaaStr: The 3 Financial Plans You Need for The Year

THE LATEST FROM SAASTR

By Jason Lemkin  · Wednesday, November 23, 2022 | SaaStr Events

Next year will be by far our biggest and best ever for IRL SaaStr events.  Early Bird tickets for all of them are on sale now at incredibly cheap prices (50% below cost) so pick up tickets for you and your team now!

We’ll have:

On February 22-23, our first SaaStr APAC comes to Singapore!  We’ll have top VCs from Accel, Bessemer, B Capital, and so many other leaders, along with tons of unicorns and more, and great execs to meet with from Xero, ServiceNow, and more.  It’s the first one, so we’re planning for 600-800 folks, and we’ll cap it at around 1,000. 

On 6-7 June, our fourth SaaStr Europa comes to London for the first time! At a super cool venue in East London, we’ll have space for 4,000 SaaS founders, VCs, and execs.

On September 6-8, it’s time for SaaStr Annual 2023!  Our 9th Annual will be even better than 2022, which had our highest NPS of all time.  We’ve really perfected the hybrid outdoor / festival vibe, with 10 stages running at the same time, and over 100 Braindates and mentorship sessions an hour.  It’s just so fun now that we have a hybrid outdoor format stretched across 40+ acres.  We’re tracking for about 12,500 attendees this year.  

NEW PODCAST + VIDEO

By Amelia Ibarra  · Wednesday, November 23, 2022 | Fundraising, Metrics

The success of an executive team often depends as much on their interpersonal harmony as their professional expertise. How does a team establish rapport with one another? Algolia’s Bernadette Nixon (Chief Executive Officer) and Michelle Adams (Chief Revenue Officer) have spent the past few years developing this relational toolbox.

DEAR SAASTR

By Jason Lemkin · Wednesday, November 23, 2022 | Fundraising, Leadership

The biggest challenge is how to play Offense and not Defense.

As a new VC, you want two things. You want to establish yourself, and your brand, and your track record. And also. Not get fired. Not blow all the money.

The natural reactions therefore are:

• To search out more co-investors.
• To search out more comfortable deals.
• To search out logos and more well-known deals.

SAASTR SCALE

Join our next, FREE MEGA DIGITAL EVENT, SaaStr Scale 2022! Dec 7!!

Featuring:

• CEO HubSpot
• VPS Rippling
• CMO Samsara
• SVP DigitalOcean
• CMO Checkout
• CPO Checkout
• SVP Celonis
• CMO typeform
• CRO wiz_io
• CEO attentiveHQ
• + much more!!

GROWTH

By Jason Lemkin  · Tuesday, November 22, 2022 | Growth, Metrics

Ok, hopefully you’ve built a careful, thoughtful financial plan for the year.  You have your base plan, your stretch plan, a thoughtful approach to spending and burn rates, and more.

And yet … I know many of you haven’t started, or have only done a cursory job of financial planning.  That’s a mistake for several reasons. 

First, without a strong, data-driven model, your goals for next year will be much harder to hit. 

Second, even small amounts of mis-spend and over-spend can compound over the course of the year to a much higher burn rate.

And third, and most importantly, you need to know how far to stretch.  Without a strong plan, doing even better is just … a hope.

VIDEO

By Amelia Ibarra · Tuesday, November 22, 2022 | Growth, Metrics

Everyone likes the freedom of choice and to feel like they’re part of something, and that’s exactly what Gitlab sets out to do. At its inception in 2011, the goal was to have a place for developers to gather and collaborate together. What it’s turned into is an active community with an “open-source mindset.”

In this week’s Workshop Wednesday, CMO and CSO at Gitlab, Ashley Kramer, dives deep into one of the best marketing assets a company can have, and that’s open-source communities. 

Q&A

By Jason Lemkin · Tuesday, November 22, 2022 | Sales

One simple answer:  train your reps more.  A lot more.

With most SaaS companies, for a while, demos get worse:

• At first, founders do all the demos. The demos themselves are a bit rambling, too long — but full of passion.  And Q&A is A+++.  After all, they built the product.
• Then — you finally get a few good reps.  They simplify & just kill the demo once they get going.  Because they also know how to close.  The early reps, if they are great, are often true product experts.  In a way later reps … almost never are.  That First Great Rep is just different.  
• But … then … you hire more and more reps …  the knowledge isn’t transferred.  Founders step out of demos.  There is no formal training.  Each rep hacks in on her own.  They don’t know the product as well.  So the demos get worse and worse.

Tip the payment scales in your favor by being one of the first to unlock exclusive early access to BlueSnap's 2023 Payment Predictions eBook.

Your sales and customer success teams are losing deals and customers due to backlogged integration requests.

But can you really justify spending months of development on each integration, when an embedded iPaaS can help offload 70% of the work?

There are a lot of factors to consider in this build vs. buy decision, and it's all outlined in this guide.

© SaaStr 2022

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